Some species that breed over large geographic areas can still be adapted to a fairly narrow range of climates, making them more vulnerable to climate change than previously thought. Also, species with larger brains (relative to their body size) tend to be adapted to narrower climate niches, which suggests they too could also be more vulnerable than once thought.

By analyzing DNA from different cells in nearly 200 lines of maize plants, research led by the University of Michigan has revealed insights that could help growers better adapt their crops to a fast-changing environment. 

Raj Nooyi Endowed Research Award Fund supports studies on improving care for children with complex needs and advancing healthy aging research

Researchers led by Keigo Morita and Shinya Kuroda of the University of Tokyo have revealed a temporal disruption in the metabolism of obese mice when adapting to starvation despite no significant structural disruptions in the molecular network. This is a breakthrough discovery as research including the temporal dimension in biology has been notoriously laborious and extracting systematic insight from big data has been difficult. Thus, this study paves the way for further research into more general metabolic processes, such as food intake and disease progression. The findings were published in the journal Science Signaling.

Expecting feedback from an avatar compared to a real human facilitates risk-taking behavior in a gambling task, and a brain region called the amygdala is central to this facilitation, according to a study published April 22^nd in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Toshiko Tanaka and Masahiko Haruno from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan.

A new comparison and analysis of the genomes of species in the genus Malus, which includes the domesticated apple and its wild relatives, revealed the evolutionary relationships among the species and how their genomes have evolved over the past nearly 60 million years. The research team identified structural variations among the genomes and developed methods for identifying genes associated with desirable traits, like tastiness and resistance to disease and cold, that could help guide future apple breeding programs.